Philip Pullman Returns to His Fantasy World

After 17 years, the author of the trilogy “His Dark Materials” carries on the story of one of literature’s most indelible heroines.

CreditNadav Kander for The New York Times

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By Sophie Elmhirst

Oct. 12, 2017

On one of my first meetings with Philip Pullman, he led me to the crenelated tower of Exeter College, in Oxford, and pointed out the room he lived in as a student. More than 50 feet up from the ground was a tiny attic window. To visit friends living in rooms on the adjacent staircase — accessible only at ground level — Pullman, a tall, sturdy man with a head like a boulder, would clamber out his window, shimmy along a gutter and propel himself through a window into a bathroom. From where we were standing, the feat looked unlikely, and unwise. Pullman was self-deprecating. “It was less precarious than it seems because it’s actually quite a large gutter, and it’s quite deep,” he said. “And I was drunk. So.”

Oxford has always been an incubator for fantasists: Lewis Carroll dreamed up “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” here. J.R.R. Tolkien (“The Lord of the Rings”) and his friend C.S. Lewis (“The Chronicles of Narnia”) met weekly at a pub down the road to discuss their books. Pullman has followed in their wake: 30 years after his tipsy progress along the gutter, he returned to his rooftop on the page. “Lyra barged open the door, dragged her rickety chair to the window, flung wide the casement, and scrambled out,” he wrote in the first volume of his epic trilogy, “His Dark Materials.” “The room I gave to Lyra,” Pullman said, looking up, “was the room I had myself.”

Lyra Silvertongue, Lyra Belacqua, but really just Lyra: one of those characters in literature — Pip, Emma, Lolita — who is on first-name terms with her public. Pullman has written 35 books, mostly for children and young adults, but Lyra stands foremost among his protagonists, a plucky scamp of mysterious origins who lives among Oxford academics and is accompanied through life, like almost everyone in the universe of “His Dark Materials,” by her dæmon, a shape-shifting animal self.

Over the three books — 1995’s “Northern Lights” (published in the United States under the title “The Golden Compass”), 1997’s “The Subtle Knife” and 2000’s “The Amber Spyglass” — Lyra embarks on a multiverse-crossing quest that starts as an attempt to find a missing friend and becomes a battle against the dark forces of a totalitarian religious government, the Magisterium. They can be read as pure adventure, escapade after escapade, but they’re also a philosophical exploration of what it means to be alive, and an inverted reading of Milton’s “Paradise Lost.” (In Pullman’s version, original sin is cause for celebration.)

The books are often interpreted by literary critics as one long argument against the destructive power of organized religion. (To Pullman’s delight, his trilogy came in second in a 2008 list issued by the American Library Association of books that people have tried to have banned, primarily, in its case, because of its “religious viewpoint.”) But their ambition is more optimistic. In a lecture called “The Republic of Heaven,” from the forthcoming essay collection “Dæmon Voices,” he spoke of the challenge “to reclaim a vision of heaven from the wreck of religion; to realize that our human nature demands meaning and joy ... to accept that this meaning and joy will involve a passionate love of the physical world.”

C.S. Lewis (“a paranoid bigot,” according to Pullman) provided anti-inspiration. Pullman could never bear the heavy Christian moralizing in “Narnia,” but he objected most of all to Lewis’s censorious judgment of his own characters, such as Susan, the second oldest of the Pevensie children, who is excluded from Narnia after indulging in “nylons and lipstick and invitations.” In Pullman’s world, the children are allowed to grow up. Lyra is the heroine, but she is also a child hitting puberty, falling in love for the first time, discovering her sexual self.

The books have been published in more than 40 languages, sold nearly 18 million copies and spawned a radio play, a two-part National Theater production, a Hollywood movie and a new BBC adaptation. In 2002, they achieved the presumed impossible and outsold Harry Potter in Britain. And now, after 17 years, Lyra is back. “La Belle Sauvage,” the first volume of Pullman’s next trilogy, “The Book of Dust,” will be published on Oct. 19.

The period before publication is a skittish time, particularly when readers’ expectations have had nearly two decades to ferment. When I visited him at his home in September, Pullman said he wasn’t exactly nervous, “but I just don’t know what the reaction will be.” His reputation seems unassailable. Letters can reach him — like the one fixed to his fridge — addressed to “Philip Pullman, Famous Author, Oxford.” He has won shelves of awards, including the 2005 Astrid Lindgren Memorial Prize, the world’s most lucrative prize for children’s literature, worth more than $600,000. “He’s the giant among us all,” the fellow children’s author Michael Morpurgo, author of “War Horse,” told me. “The range and depth of his imagination and of his learning certainly make him the Tolkien of our day, there’s no question about that.” But Pullman can, at times, betray a surprising lack of self-assurance. That morning, he said, he listened to John le Carré talking on the radio and thought, “Gosh, compared to him, I’m just a child.”

The publication date of “La Belle Sauvage” is, by chance, Pullman’s 71st birthday. “I’ve felt 80 or 90 the last few years,” he said, sitting in his preferred love seat in his living room, surrounded by collapsing piles of books and his ukulele collection. “At the moment, I feel, oh, oh ... ” He paused. “I feel 68.” Pullman’s dry, understated tone makes the jokes almost undetectable, but that he’s able to joke at all is progress. Two years ago, when I first visited him in Oxford, he was suffering the effects of complications from a prostate operation. He was in near-constant pain and exhausted — at times only able to sleep in 15-minute bursts — and he wore the gray, spent expression of someone used to enduring something awful in silence. Earlier this year, another operation fixed the problem. Now he looked transformed. His skin had rediscovered color, his hair had turned from pencil gray to brilliant white and stood out from his head as if he’d just been mildly electroshocked. If he had a beard, he would pass for Father Christmas.

There had been another recent transformation: A ponytail that used to lurk around the nape of Pullman’s neck was severed by Judith, his wife of 47 years, minutes after he wrote the last sentence of the second volume of “The Book of Dust.” “It was like Samson,” he said. “I had to not cut my hair while I was writing or else it would have all gone wrong. It was horrible.” He meant the ponytail. And then, eagerly, “Do you want to see it?” He jumped up from his chair and rummaged through stacks of papers on his dinner table. (Pullman’s home — an old farmhouse just outside Oxford — is wallpapered with literature and stuffed with ornaments and pictures, the kind of place where it’s not always easy to see the floor.) Then he pulled out a small plastic bag in which lay the hair, tied with a gold-edged purple ribbon. “It looks a bit like a shaving brush,” he said.

Every day from roughly 10 until 1, Pullman sits at his desk in a monkish study at the top of the house and produces three pages, longhand. He has written three pages a day ever since he started writing. Habit, he is fond of saying, has written far more books than talent. The ritual is sacred. As is the space. “Nobody’s photographed this, and nobody will ever photograph this,” he told me, both fierce and faintly amused by the severity of his own rule. “I’m superstitious about that, very superstitious about that.”

Arranged on the desk are various objects of mystical significance. “I write more easily, more comfortably, with less anxiety if I’ve got my various magic bits on the table,” he said. The magic bits consist of a piece of scientific apparatus used in the search for dark matter, a magnifying glass and his “special pen.” Pullman has three special pens — Montblanc ballpoints — one in his study, one in his bag and one on the table downstairs for letter writing and signing books that people bring to his door (“which sometimes happens”). There is special paper, too: “I started ‘His Dark Materials’ on the sort of paper you could get 30 years ago, A4, narrow-lined, with two holes. Then they started making paper with four holes, and I discovered I couldn’t write on that.” He acknowledged with a brief apologetic glance the lunacy of this statement. “This is what I did that’s even more bonkers. I had to finish ‘The Amber Spyglass,’ and I could only get four-hole paper, so I got some four-hole paper and some of those little white stickers and solemnly put them over the holes.” Eventually, he found a Canadian supplier selling his preferred, two-holed paper. “I’ve got enough for 10,000 years, I think.”

Pullman likes to inhabit such contradictions: a man who doesn’t believe in God but does believe in magic. One of his favorite books is “The Secret Commonwealth,” by a 17th-century Scottish minister, Robert Kirk, that explores life beyond empirical reach. Fairies, witches, ghosts. Does he really believe in these things? “When I’m writing about them, yes,” he said. “It’s not naïve, but the sort of answer it requires is one of the Keats type. The negative-capability type. Both believing and not believing. Skeptical about everything but credulous about everything, too.” He gets the kind of kick out of unreality that could be dismissed as childlike if it hadn’t molded his imagination. “I like the irrational, I like ghosts,” he said. “They help me to write.”

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Pullman at his home near Oxford.CreditNadav Kander for The New York Times

Pullman was born in 1946 to Audrey and Alfred, a pilot in the Royal Air Force. The family moved often. “You got used to being a bit of an outsider,” he said. “I am by nature a looker-on rather than a taker-part.” Alfred was killed in a plane crash in 1953, when Pullman was 7. He knows little about his lost father and discovered only after his mother’s death in 1990 that the couple had separated before he died.

Episodes from an itinerant childhood still haunt him. Audrey remarried, the family moved to Australia and Pullman remembers his stepfather, also an R.A.F. pilot, once driving them “to a spot from which we could see one of the flooded rivers. I still remember this immense gray mass, sweeping inexorably from one side to another. There was no possible way of going against it or fighting with it. I was just aghast and thunderstruck by the power of this thing. So that’s always been with me.”

The family returned to Britain by ship and moved deep into rural Wales. Pullman’s youngest half brother, Mark, recalled the walks the children would take across the Welsh hills, during which Pullman would offer entertainment. “He’d tell us stories of things he’d read,” Mark recalled. “He’d tell us myths. He was studying Anglo-Saxon languages, and he’d tell us stories about that. There were always stories.” But at home, he was an outlier. “My parents weren’t literary people,” Pullman said, “in the sense of being passionately interested in books.” They read, but not the way he did, as if it were all that mattered. In Wales, he developed a committed relationship with a mobile library and is still grateful enough to the woman in the village who let him borrow her books to pay her homage in “La Belle Sauvage.” Dr. Hannah Relf lends the trilogy’s new hero, Malcolm Polstead, a classic Pullman reading list: Stephen Hawking’s “A Brief History of Time,” Agatha Christie’s “The Body in the Library” and a history of the Silk Road.

Pullman remembers being the only pupil at his school to sit for the Oxford University exam, and he was granted a scholarship. “Which was delightful,” he said. “But they must have realized how wrong they were within five minutes of starting the first tutorial, I think. I wasn’t a scholar. I’m not that sort of intellectual.” He emerged three years later with a third-class degree, the school’s lowest, and became a teacher, which gave him both time to write and an audience. At Bishop Kirk middle school in Oxford, he wrote plays for his students and told them his versions of the “Odyssey” and the “Iliad.” “I told each story three times a week, and I taught for 12 years,” he said. “So I must have told each one 36 times. I have all the stories entirely clear in my head and can call them up whenever I want.”

The Greeks permeate his writing. Like Odysseus, his new hero, Malcolm, is on a self-appointed quest, fighting off enemies from his boat. (He’s also very unlike Odysseus, being 11 years old, ginger-haired and partial, like Pullman, to woodworking and meat pies.) “The Book of Dust” has other touchstones too: William Blake, the occult, ancient civilizations, East Asia and a eight-minute piece by Borodin called “In the Steppes of Central Asia.” Most of all, Edmund Spenser’s epic, 16th-century allegory, “The Faerie Queene.” Pullman copies the structure of “The Faerie Queene” — strange encounter after strange encounter — but thankfully not its style. When I admitted how I had struggled with the countless pages of archaic verse, Pullman shouted, gleeful, from his seat: “So did I! Couldn’t read it. Couldn’t read it at all until I was doing this.” His own novel is more readable, and earthier, locked into reality by character and geography, Malcolm and Oxford. In it, Lyra is 6 months old and being hunted by henchmen of the Magisterium. The action unfolds in Oxford, but an Oxford unrecognizable from its spire-crowded postcard form — the city is a damp and threatening place of inns and drunks and amiable nuns. For half the book they are all submerged in a catastrophic flood. Malcolm navigates the waters in his canoe and becomes Lyra’s chief protector. After a gentle start, the novel accelerates into an action thriller, with cameos from fairies and river gods. There are boat chases, hints at romance. It will be devoured.

For a man whose novels are restless, whose characters never stop traveling, Pullman leads a relatively static life. After the morning shift at his desk, he spends his afternoons either tending to the 800-odd trees he and Judith have planted in the fields behind their house or in his carpentry workshop, where he makes things like reading stands and chopsticks. Occasionally, he drives an elderly woman in the village to the library, and he goes to the cinema once a week with his publisher and close friend David Fickling and their wives. “I have the company of the people I’m writing about,” Pullman told me. “Jude and I are quite happy here with our hermitlike existence.”

Together, they have the silent rhythms of their almost 50-year marriage (they have two grown-up sons and four grandchildren). He makes the soup; she makes the bread. They listen to classical music and berate the government over lunch at the kitchen table. Judith — gray-haired, gentle-voiced, wry — gives the impression of someone who is particularly unfazed by her husband’s reputation and absorbed in her own projects. (All those trees.) Once when I visited in midsummer, she was simultaneously watching a tennis match on television while checking cricket scores on an iPad. Judith had been a teacher, too, and the pair share passionate views on what the education of children should involve — more imagination, fewer tests. She is essential to Pullman’s work — his first reader and “a truth teller,” Fickling said. “I’d defer to her.” As we ate lunch at their home, she recalled reading “Northern Lights” for the first time while sitting upstairs on their bed. When she finally got to the end — in one engrossed sitting — she sprinted down the stairs and out into the garden to find him, shouting, “This is it!”

“La Belle Sauvage” is dedicated to Judith and is, surely, the beginning of the end of Lyra’s world. When we met during the worst of Pullman’s illness, I wondered, guiltily, if he would ever finish it. He was midway through the second volume — Lyra was in the Levant, and she still had to get to Central Asia. “A long way to go,” said Pullman wearily at the time.

Now he is rejuvenated, though there remains more work to do. Before it can be published, the second volume of “The Book of Dust” requires what he calls “carpentry.” The structure needs to be sawed up and reassembled, the sentences sanded smooth. The third book then needs to find its way out of his head and onto his two-holed paper. He warned there would be a delay, just as there was before the last volume of “His Dark Materials.” (At the time, Pullman received a letter from a young reader: “Mr. Pullman, I’ve attached a picture of a cute little squirrel. Please admire it. Now I want you to think of your book, ‘The Amber Spyglass,’ for which the whole world has been waiting aeons. Hurry up and finish your book or the squirrel will die.”)

I asked him if, when he finally reaches the end, he’ll bid farewell to Lyra, a character who has colonized his imagination for decades, whom he’ll have nurtured from diapers to adulthood. “Who can tell?” he said. “I’ve got plenty of other things I want to write. I want to write a memoir. I want to write about my childhood.” Pullman, in his fireside seat, sounded momentarily wistful, even sentimental — the tone of someone conscious of limited time. He wants to tell the story of his own life, he said, “as a way of reminding myself about it. A way of bringing it back to me. And because I want to write about things I loved. Things I saw. Like that flood. I want to preserve it.”

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